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Mining for Followers and Facebook Fraud

For the past month I’ve been doing some digging while trying to build my digital network contacts. And what I’ve found is emptiness. I started by searching for ‘interesting’ people on Twitter. People in the tech category or places I’d like to work for in the future. While doing this, I’d follow people based on their feed. I’d visit their blog / website and get to know a little bit more about them and / or their business. I wanted to show my general interest in them. I DM’d the few that followed back and mentioned something I found on their blog / website that piqued my interest. What did I get? No response.

It was then obvious to me that some people are only interested in seeing their Twitter followers grow. They could careless about engaging with their followers. What’s also funny, is the people who didn’t respond were generally those who had the same amount of followers as people they followed. They obviously scoured the Twitterverse and started following as many people as they could in the hope people would follow back.

Those people aren’t for me. I’d rather have quality followers over quantity. I know when I tweet my followers will read what I tweeted because they trust what I’m posting will be of interest to them. That’s the whole point of Twitter on a peer-to-peer basis.

What I also found and continue to find is people who follow me don’t engage with me. I check out their stuff, follow them and DM them asking them what made them follow me. Were they interested in my content? Or were they only ‘mining’ for followers? Again, I get no response, so I unfollow them.

Like any social platoform out there. It’s about QUALITY not QUANTITY. If your business has 10,000 followers on Twitter and 50,000 ‘likes’ on your Facebook fan page, but you haven’t seen your profits grow, maybe you should double-check your social media strategy. Come to think of it? Do you even have a social media strategy?

On that note – check out the ‘Facebook Fraud’ video below. It may explain why you have sooo many ‘likes’, yet haven’t sold a damn thing through Facebook.